Graphic Design: The New Basics: Second Edition, Revised and Expanded PDF
Preview Graphic Design: The New Basics: Second Edition, Revised and Expanded
Published by Princeton Architectural Press 37 East Seventh Street New York, New York 10003 Visit our website at www.papress.com. © 2008, 2015 Princeton Architectural Press All rights reserved No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews. Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lupton, Ellen, author. Graphic design : the new basics / Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips. — Second Edition, Revised and Expanded. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-61689-325-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-61689-332-3 (paperback : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-61689-455-9 (epub, mobi) 1. Graphic arts. I. Phillips, Jennifer C., 1960– author. II. Title. NC997.L87 2015 741.6—dc23 2014046286 For Maryland Institute College of Art Book Design Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips Contributing Faculty Ken Barber Kristian Bjørnard Kimberly Bost Jeremy Botts Corinne Botz Bernard Canniffe Nancy Froehlich Brockett Horne Tal Leming Ellen Lupton Al Maskeroni Sandra Maxa Ryan McCabe Abbott Miller Kiel Mutschelknaus Jennifer Cole Phillips James Ravel Zvezdana Stojmirovic Nolen Strals Mike Weikert Bruce Willen Yeohyun Ahn Visiting Artists Marian Bantjes Nicholas Blechman Alicia Cheng Peter Cho Malcolm Grear David Plunkert C. E. B. Reas Paul Sahre Jan van Toorn Rick Valicenti For Princeton Architectural Press Editors Clare Jacobson and Nicola Brower Special thanks to Janet Behning, Erin Cain, Megan Carey, Carina Cha, Andrea Chlad, Tom Cho, Barbara Darko, Benjamin English, Russell Fernandez, Jan Cigliano Hartman, Jan Haux, Mia Johnson, Diane Levinson, Jennifer Lippert, Katharine Myers, Jaime Nelson, Rob Shaeffer, Sara Stemen, Marielle Suba, Kaymar Thomas, Paul Wagner, Joseph Weston, and Janet Wong of Princeton Architectural Press —Kevin C. Lippert, publisher Contents 6 Foreword 8 Back to the Bauhaus Ellen Lupton 10 Beyond the Basics Jennifer Cole Phillips 12 Formstorming 32 Point, Line, Plane 48 Rhythm and Balance 60 Scale 68 Texture 80 Color 98 Gestalt Principles 116 Framing 128 Hierarchy 140 Layers 154 Transparency 166 Modularity 186 Grid 200 Pattern 214 Diagram 232 Time and Motion 248 Rules and Randomness 260 Bibliography 262 Index Foreword Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips This book is a guide to visual form-making, showing designers how to build richness and complexity around simple relationships. We created the first edition of this book in 2008 because we didn’t see anything quite like it for today’s students and young designers: a concise, contemporary guide to two-dimensional design. Since its release, Graphic Design: The New Basics has reached an enthusiastic audience around the world. Everywhere we go, we meet educators and young designers who have used the book and learned something from it. What’s new in this volume? You will find updated and expanded content throughout the book, reflecting new ideas emerging in our classrooms at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). The most important addition to this volume, however, is an entirely new opening chapter devoted to “formstorming,” a term originated by Jennifer Cole Phillips. Formstorming is a set of structured techniques for generating visual solutions to graphic design challenges. We open the book with this chapter in order to plunge our readers directly into the act of visual invention. As educators with decades of combined experience in graduate and undergraduate teaching, we have witnessed the design world change and change again in response to new technologies. When we were students ourselves in the 1980s, classic books such as Armin Hofmann’s Graphic Design Manual (published in 1965) had begun to lose their relevance within the restless and shifting design scene. Postmodernism was on the rise, and abstract design exercises seemed out of step with the interest at that time in appropriation and historicism. During the 1990s, design educators became caught in the pressure to teach (and learn) software, and many of us struggled to balance technical skills with visual and critical thinking. Form sometimes got technical skills with visual and critical thinking. Form sometimes got lost along the way, as design methodologies moved away from universal visual concepts toward a more anthropological understanding of design as a constantly changing flow of cultural sensibilities. This book addresses the gap between software and visual thinking. By focusing on form, we have re-embraced the pioneering work of modernist design educators, from Josef Albers and László Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus to Armin Hofmann and some of our own great teachers, including Malcolm Grear. We initiated this project when we noticed that our students were not at ease building concepts abstractly. They were adept at working and reworking pop-culture vocabularies, but they were less comfortable manipulating scale, rhythm, color, hierarchy, grids, and diagrammatic relationships. This is a book for students and emerging designers, and it is illustrated primarily with student work, produced within graduate and undergraduate design studios. Our school, MICA, has been our laboratory. Numerous faculty and scores of students participated in our brave experiment. The work shown on these pages is varied and diverse, reflecting an organic range of skill levels and sensibilities. Unless otherwise noted, all the student examples were generated in the context of MICA’s courses; a few projects originate from schools we visited or where our own graduate alumni are teaching. Our student contributors come from China, India, Japan, Korea, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, Zimbabwe, a wide range of US states, and many other places. The book was manufactured in China and published with Princeton Architectural Press in New York City. It was thus created in a global context. The work presented within its pages is energized by the diverse backgrounds of its producers, whose creativity is shaped by their cultural identities as well as by their unique life experiences. A common thread that draws all these people together in one place is design. The majority of student work featured here comes from the course we teach together at MICA, the Graphic Design MFA Studio. Our MFA program’s first publishing venture was the book D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself (2006), directed at general readers who want to use design in their own lives. We have published a series of other titles since then, including Indie Publishing (2009), Graphic Design Thinking (2010), and Type on Screen (2014). These books are researched and produced under the aegis of MICA’s Center for Design Thinking, an umbrella for organizing the college’s diverse efforts in the area of design education research. Complementing the student work included in this book are examples from contemporary professional practice that demonstrate visually rich design approaches. Many of the designers featured, including Marian Bantjes, Alicia Cheng, Peter Cho, Malcolm Grear, David Plunkert, C. E. B. Reas, Paul Sahre, Rick Valicenti, and Jan van Toorn, have worked with our students as visiting artists at MICA. Some conducted special workshops, whose results are included in this volume. Graphic Design: The New Basics lays out the elements of a visual language whose forms are employed by individuals, institutions, and communities that are increasingly connected in a global society. We hope the book will inspire more thought and creativity in the years ahead. Acknowledgments The first edition of this book constituted my degree project in the Doctorate in Communication Design program at the University of Baltimore. I thank my advisors, Stuart Moulthrop, Sean Carton, and Amy Pointer. I also thank my colleagues at MICA, including Samuel Hoi, president; Ray Allen, provost; Gwynne Keathley, vice provost for research and graduate studies; Brockett Horne, chair, Graphic Design BFA; and my longtime friend and collaborator, Jennifer Cole Phillips. Special thanks go to the dozens of students who contributed work. Editors Clare Jacobson, Nicola Brower, and the team at Princeton Architectural Press made the book real. My family is an inspiration, especially my parents Bill, Lauren, Mary Jane, and Ken; my children Jay and Ruby; my sisters Julia and Michelle; and my husband Abbott. Ellen Lupton My contribution to this book is dedicated to Malcolm Grear, mentor and friend, who taught me to approach design from the inside out, and instilled an appetite for invention and formal rigor. The culture at MICA is a joy in which to work, thanks in large part to the vision and support of our past president, Fred Lazarus; our new president, Samuel Hoi; provost Ray Allen; vice provost for research and graduate studies Gwynne Keathley; and our talented faculty colleagues. Deep respect and thanks to our students for their commitment and contributions. Heartfelt gratitude goes to my friend and close collaborator, Ellen Lupton, for raising the bar with grace and generosity. I am thankful for the support of my family and close friends, especially my parents Ann and Jack; and my sisters Lanie and Jodie. Jennifer Cole Phillips Back to the Bauhaus Ellen Lupton The idea of searching out a shared framework in which to invent and organize visual content dates back to the origins of modern graphic design. In the 1920s, institutions such as the Bauhaus in Germany explored design as a universal, perceptually based “language of vision,” a concept that continues to shape design education today around the world. This book reflects on that vital tradition in light of profound shifts in technology and global social life. Whereas the Bauhaus promoted rational solutions through planning and standardization, designers and artists today are drawn to idiosyncrasy, customization, and sublime accidents as well as to standards and norms. The modernist preference for reduced, simplified forms now coexists with a desire to build systems that yield unexpected results. Today, the impure, the contaminated, and the hybrid hold as much allure as forms that are sleek and perfected. Visual thinkers often seek to spin out intricate results from simple rules or concepts rather than reduce an image or idea to its simplest parts. The Bauhaus Legacy In the 1920s, faculty at the Bauhaus and other schools analyzed form in terms of basic geometric elements. They believed this language would be understandable to everyone, grounded in the universal instrument of the eye. Bauhaus faculty pursued this idea from different points of view. Wassily Kandinsky called for the creation of a “dictionary of elements” and a universal visual “grammar” in his Bauhaus textbook Point and Line to Plane. His colleague László Moholy-Nagy sought to uncover a rational vocabulary ratified by a shared society
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